Measuring the volume and value of the outputs of higher education institutions

One of the key issues facing the Scottish Government and Scottish Funding Council is how to assess the contribution made to Scotland's economy by Scotland's higher education sector. Higher Education's contribution to the economy and society at large is viewed as providing one of the most important justifications for government expenditure on higher education. However there is a paucity of robust quantitative evidence against which related resource allocation decisions aimed at encouraging economically valuable activity can be made. Taking higher education activity as a whole there has been no practical, valid, way to analyse the economic value of what universities do, or to compare the value thus created with that generated by other activities in the economy. The overall objective of this paper is to show how the development of a framework with comprehensive and detailed quantitative measures of the outputs of HEIs in both volume and value terms can enable a holistic analysis of higher education institutions' economic value. The present paper draws on initial case study research supported by the Nuffield Foundation which was further elaborated in two substantive reports to the Scottish Funding Council

Funding priorities and funding strategies

When planning a funding request, librarians must understand the societal forces affecting a library's parent institution and the forces affecting the library as a social system as well as a technical system. Before approaching a funding body, librarians must ask themselves whether issues that are important to them are also important to the funding body. When approaching the Council on Library Resources, specifically, librarians should be aware of four research areas of interest to the Council human resources, economics, infrastructure, and processing/access.published or submitted for publicatio

Funding guidance 2011/12 : funding regulations

"This document updates and replaces for 2011/12 the YPLA Funding Guidance 2010/11: Funding Regulations and Learner Eligibility Guidance. Of interest to local authorities, providers and other stakeholders involved in managing and delivering YPLA funded provision" - front cover

Summary report of baseline study of employability related activities in Scottish colleges

Providers report strong support for the development of employability skills and attributes,including core and 'soft' skills, both as discrete units and embedded within course provisionalongside other learning goals. Career education and guidance, including employment seeking skills, are addressed to a lesserextent than 'employability' through the inclusion of discrete units or embedded in other courseunits. While some providers include specific units in courses, student development in these areasis often addressed through central student services. Advice and guidance is most likely to beprovided at the pre-exit stage of students' programmes although it is important while students areon-course. Post-exit guidance is least likely to be supported, with colleges indicating thatobtaining progression information was difficult. Enterprise is the least likely aspect to be addressed, either in relation to business start-up or as afocus in developing enterprising skills and attitudes. College staff indicated that there was a needfor clarification on what was meant by enterprise and enterprising approaches and how theymight be incorporated into other units. There was strong support at institutional level to provide resources to enable students to reflecton issues related to employability, with course providers reporting wide use of personaldevelopment review and planning, though a wide range of terms was used to describe this

Regulatory-Optimal Funding

Funding is a cost to trading desks that they see as an input. Current FVA-related literature reflects this by also taking funding costs as an input, usually constant, and always risk-neutral. However, this funding curve is the output from a Treasury point of view. Treasury must consider Regulatory-required liquidity buffers, and both risk-neutral (Q) and physical measures (P). We describe the Treasury funding problem and optimize against both measures, using the Regulatory requirement as a constraint. We develop theoretically optimal strategies for Q and P, then demonstrate a combined approach in four markets (USD, JPY, EUR, GBP). Since we deal with physical measures we develop appropriate statistical tests, and demonstrate highly significant (p<0.00001), out-of-sample, improvements on hedged funding with a combined approach achieving 44% to 71% of a perfect information criterion. Thus regulatory liquidity requirements change both the funding problem and funding costs.Comment: 20 pages; 8 figures; 2 tables, Risk, April 201